The Tolstoys had various rituals which were faithfully observed. Each day began and ended with members of the family kissing each other’s hands, and every Sunday they would troop off to the village church (where the children would try to copy their father, who bowed so low his right hand touched the ground).35 But it was lunch which was the most ritualised occasion in the Tolstoys’ daily life. The entire family, including the children and their tutor, would gather in the drawing room to wait for Nikolay Ilyich to emerge from his study, and at the appointed time he would offer his hand to his mother to escort her into the dining room. Servants holding plates against their chests with their left hands would be stationed behind each family member’s chair, while guests would be attended to by their own servants. At the end of each meal, Tolstoy’s father would be handed his pipe and he would retire to his study; babushka would proceed to the drawing room and the children would go downstairs with Fyodor Ivanovich and draw pictures.
Tolstoy was the first to acknowledge how idyllic and privileged his early childhood was. Like so many Russian country estates at that time, Yasnaya Polyana was an almost self-sufficient kingdom, with its own population of serfs to till the fields, milk the cows, chop wood, weave carpets, cobble shoes, groom the horses, breed hounds for hunting, clear paths, complete the accounts, prepare meals, fetch water and do the laundry. It was also a whole world which Tolstoy never had to leave. Yasnaya Polyana provided a sheltered environment for him to grow up in, surrounded by his relatives and an extensive second family of household servants. It was also an elite school where he began his education with a private tutor, and an enormous playground whose woods, ponds, winding paths and streams promised the possibility of endless enticing adventures. Finally, it was a physically beautiful landscape of tree-lined avenues, elegant gardens and tranquil ponds. Tolstoy remained cocooned in this rural paradise for the first eight years of his life; indeed, the most significant journey he made during this period was downstairs, when he left the nursery at the age of five to join his elder brothers and come under the charge of his German tutor.
There are precious few third-person accounts of Tolstoy as a little boy, but his mischievousness stands out even in those few sources. In a letter Aline wrote to Toinette when he was around six, for example, she made a point of saying that it was some time since ‘little Lev’ had been dismissed from the dinner table, suggesting this had hitherto been a regular occurrence. Tolstoy’s ‘originality’ was also noticed from an early age: his relatives remembered their amusement when the young boy took it into his head one day to come into the drawing room, turn round and bow to everybody present with his backside, throwing his head back, instead of inclining it, and clicking his heels.36
When he came to write to his memoirs near the end of his life, Tolstoy refused to recount all his happy childhood memories, both because they were ‘endless’ and also because he feared it would be impossible to convey adequately to others the memories he cherished which were so important to him.37 He could recall very few specific events from his early childhood beyond his father coming and going, and the riveting stories he told about the adventures encountered on his hunting expeditions. He remembered only three occasions when something really made an impression on him, but two of these impressions are intriguing. One was when his mother’s cousin, one of the Prince Volkonskys, a hussar, came to visit when he was very small and sat him on his knee. In his memoirs Tolstoy writes that the experience of feeling constricted compelled him to try to break loose while the young officer talked over his head to the other adults. This resulted in the hussar holding the young Lev even tighter. The feeling of captivity, of not being free, he writes in his memoirs, so incensed him that he started howling and trying to escape.38 Tolstoy would spend his life asserting his independence and resisting people’s attempts to make him conform.
The other notable impression, made by another relative who visited Yasnaya Polyana, ‘the famous American’, Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy, his uncle-once-removed, was far more positive, and is connected to what Tolstoy defined as the cardinal family trait: dikost. This is a word with many meanings, as so often encountered in the Russian language. Dikost literally means ‘wildness’, but it can also convey unsociableness or shyness. In other contexts it can mean weirdness, eccentricity, or absurdity. Tolstoy liked further to define dikost, when applying this word to members of his family, as the quality of possessing passion and daring. It was not a noun with negative connotations in his book. For him it denoted originality and independence of thought, as well as the propensity to do the opposite of everyone else. Tolstoy himself certainly went against the grain in almost everything he did as an adult, and even used dikost in this vein to describe the radical ideas he wished to apply to education when launching his pedagogical journal in 1862.39 Tolstoy perceived dikost not only in many of his illustrious ancestors, but also in some of his contemporary relatives – even his very prim and proper distant relative, who was a spirited but nevertheless very poised lady-in-waiting at the imperial court. ‘You’ve got the Tolstoyan dikost that we all have,’ he wrote to Alexandra Andreyevna in 1865. ‘It was not for nothing that Fyodor Ivanovich got himself tattooed.’40 Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy was indeed the wildest Tolstoy of them alclass="underline" while visiting a Polynesian island in the South Pacific as a young man, he decided to emulate the natives by having his body completely covered in tattoos. Alexandra Andreyevna in turn called her younger relative Lev Nikolayevich ‘the roaring lion’41 (the word Lev in Russian meaning both Leo and lion).
Tolstoy also invested one of his most autobiographical characters with dikost. ‘All you Levins are diky,’ says the sophisticated bon viveur Stiva Oblonsky to his socially awkward but ardent, truth-seeking friend Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina; ‘you always do what no one else does.’42 This is precisely how Tolstoy was perceived by his contemporaries. In 1868 Eugene Schuyler, the newly appointed American consul to Moscow, was discouraged but not deterred from meeting Tolstoy by a society hostess who characterised Tolstoy as ‘very shy and very wild’.43 If it was from his early ancestor Count Pyotr Andreyevich that Tolstoy inherited his capacity for erudition, it was probably from Fyodor Ivanovich, the ‘wild’ Tolstoy who got himself tattooed all over, that he inherited his independent spirit and physical strength. Young Lev Tolstoy hardly needed fairy tales when there was a relative in his own family whose life story read like an adventure novel – and his own son Sergey was later so captivated that he published a short biography of Fyodor Tolstoy in 1926.44